Armenian organizations were outraged by President Joe Biden’s Armenian Remembrance Day statement on Wednesday because he did not mention modern genocide against Armenian Christians of the Nagorno-Karabakh region completed this year by the conquering armies of Muslim Azerbaijan.
Some Armenian American leaders accused Biden of actively supporting the Azerbaijani conquest, while others said he used Armenian Remembrance Day as a convenient excuse to avoid mentioning it. Armenians and their supporters marched outside the White House on Wednesday to demand “justice” for both the 1915 and 2023 genocides:
AYF March for Justice for the Armenian Genocide (1915) and Artsakh Genocide (2023) at the White House https://t.co/qH9vNOnBt0
— ANCA (@ANCA_DC) April 24, 2024
Armenian Remembrance Day is commemorated on April 24 each year, the date considered by historians to mark the beginning of Meds Yeghern, the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire in 1915.
April 24 was the day Ottoman officials arrested hundreds of prominent Armenians and forced them into exile. Armenians living in Turkey had an uneasy relationship with the government, which feared they might launch a separatist movement. Angered by their humiliation at the hands of Christian armies in the First Balkan War of 1912-13, Turkish nationalists turned their fury against the Armenian Christian minority, coming to view the Armenians as a seditious population colluding with European powers to bring the Ottoman Empire down.
The exile of Armenian intellectuals was soon followed by a mass deportation of Armenians from Turkey – which degenerated from ethnic cleansing into genocide when Turkish troops began massacring the Armenian refugees and herding them into concentration camps. At least 1.5 million Armenians were killed, of an estimated 2 million living in the Ottoman Empire, and some historians believe the full death count was much higher. Amid the insane bloodletting of the First World War, the Armenian death march offered a chilling preview of the horrors to come in the Second World War.
The Armenian genocide is politically contentious in the modern day because every Turkish government, from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire to the current authoritarian administration, has strongly resisted classifying the event as “genocide” despite overwhelming historical evidence.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for example, insisted in 2019 that the genocide was merely a “reasonable action” to “relocate” an unruly population after “Armenian gangs and their supporters … massacred the Muslim people, including women and children.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks to the attendees during a rally to show their solidarity with the Palestinians, in Istanbul, Turkey, Saturday, Oct. 28, 2023 (Emrah Gurel/AP).
On Armenian Remembrance Day 2024, Istanbul officials banned a ceremony to commemorate the genocide, having found the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic a convenient excuse to prohibit the ceremony from 2020 onward.
Armenians march during the annual torch march on the eve of the Genocide Remembrance Day beginning at Republic Square and ending at the Tsitsernakaberd Genocide Memorial on Wednesday, April 23, 2024. The Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day is a public holiday and observed on April 24th each year to commemorate the victims of the Armenian genocide between 1915 to 1923 (Anthony Pizzoferrato / Middle East Images / Middle East Images via AFP)
Erdogan issued a statement of condolences on Wednesday to “Armenian citizens of the Ottoman Empire who died in the difficult First World War conditions,” as if most of them were soldiers who died fighting for the Empire that massacred them.
Erdogan threw in condolences to all Ottoman citizens who were “martyred as a result of internal strife, insurrection, guerilla [sic] activity, and terrorism rest in peace,” a backhanded reference to his previous insistence that the Armenians got what was coming to them for abusing Muslims, although he concluded by insisting his government would “not allow even a single one of [our] Armenian citizens to be ostracized and feel secondary in their country.”
American administrations have generally performed a balancing act by acknowledging the deaths of Armenians during World War One but avoiding the term “genocide,” as they knew it would enrage the Turkish government, which is a strategically important but politically unsteady member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Then-President Donald Trump, for instance, paid tribute to Armenian massacre as “one of the worst mass atrocities of the 20th Century” but resisted a Senate effort to formally denounce the events of 1915 as “genocide.” At the time, Erdogan was threatening to shut down the vital Incirlik Air Base and possibly even more U.S. military facilities in Turkey because of both the genocide controversy and disagreements with the U.S. over Syria policy.
Biden, however, did use the word “genocide” in his statement on Armenian Remembrance Day in 2021. The political situation in Turkey had shifted somewhat by then, so Erdogan’s displeasure was much more muted than it was in 2019, although he did vow to “defend the truth against the lie of the so-called ‘Armenian genocide.’”
Biden referred to Meds Yeghern as “the Armenian genocide” again in his statement on Wednesday, saluted “the resilience of the Armenian people,” and said the Armenian diaspora has “strengthened the fabric of nations around the world.”
What made the statement controversial was that Biden had nothing to say about Azerbaijan’s brutal ethnic cleansing of Armenian Christians from Nagorno-Karabakh, a contested region that has sparked several clashes and one recent war between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
The Azeris conquered the region by force in September 2023, destroying the Armenians’ Republic of Artsakh and turning its roughly 120,000 residents into refugees.
The Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) said Biden was “shamefully silent” about the conquest of Artsakh, which the committee referred to as “genocide.” Worse, it said this genocide was a crime Biden “actively armed and morally emboldened.”
“He’s using remembrance of a past genocide (by Turkey) to cover up a current genocide (by Azerbaijan),” ANCA charged.
The ANCA gave Biden only tepid praise for recognizing the Armenian Genocide in 2021 because he only did so “after Armenians worldwide, after decades of work, got the ball to the one yard line – via both house of Congress, all 50 states, countless municipalities, and multiple NATO allies.”
“It’s not that Biden was a bystander to Azerbaijan’s genocide of Artsakh’s Christian Armenians. He was an upstander – but on the side of genocide. He armed and emboldened Azerbaijan as it systematically blockaded, terrorized & ethnically cleansed indigenous, innocent civilians,” the group said.
ANCA’s program director for Washington DC, Alex Galitsky, credited Biden for being “the first President to recognize the Armenian Genocide” but said that made it all the more outrageous that just one day before that landmark recognition, Biden “reauthorized military aid to Azerbaijan – a decision that would embolden Baku’s genocidal regime.”
Galitsky said Biden “recognized one genocide only to enable another.” He also accused Biden of turning a “blind eye” to Azerbaijan’s punishing blockade of the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh before the final attack began. The blockade caused a massive humanitarian crisis and was denounced by some observers as an attempt to use “starvation as a means of genocide”
Galitsky was also unsparing in his criticism of Biden’s predecessor, and possible successor, Donald Trump for sending “millions in military aid to Azerbaijan before the 2020 Artsakh War.” He expressed a preference for dark-horse candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. as “the only candidate calling for accountability for Azerbaijan’s genocide of Artsakh.”
Kennedy delivered a videotaped address on Armenian Remembrance Day to the demonstrators in which he called for tough U.S. sanctions against Azerbaijan, denounced the Azeris for taking Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh “hostage,” and demanded a right of return for all of the Armenian refugees forced from the region in 2023.
“Though today we commemorate the 109th anniversary of the beginning of the Armenian Genocide, the plight of the Armenians is not over – and we must recommit ourselves to end the ethnic cleansing and defend Armenians’ right to self-determination,” Kennedy said.
Biden did indeed keep money flowing to Azerbaijan, even after it fought a war against Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh and blocked humanitarian supplies with its terrible Lachin Corridor blockade, because the administration felt that cutting of Azerbaijan’s access to American taxpayer funding would anger the Azerbaijani government enough to make it suspend peace talks with Armenia.
Strictly speaking, military aid to Azerbaijan has been banned since it launched the first war over Nagorno-Karabakh in 1992. However, beginning in 2001, Congress allowed the State Department to issue waivers from the ban, effectively neutralizing it, because Azerbaijan looked like it could become a useful Muslim ally against Iran.
The Trump administration pumped millions into Azerbaijan, as Galitsky ruefully noted, because the Azeris seemed hostile to both Iran and Russia, while Armenia was unwisely cozying up to Moscow – although after watching Russia’s useless “peacekeepers” sit on their hands while Azerbaijan pulverized Artsakh, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan appears to be rethinking that alliance.
The Biden State Department largely continued these policies, rushing to assure Azerbaijan that it valued America’s “strategic partnership with Azerbaijan” even as Christians in Artsakh battled disease and starvation.
In November 2023, the Senate passed legislation that would finally cut off U.S. security assistance to Azerbaijan, both to “send a strong message” of revulsion at the ethnic cleansing, and because fears were growing that Azerbaijan might attack Armenia itself. The House has yet to pass the Armenian Protection Act, which would end Azerbaijan’s waivers from the funding ban for at least two years.
The ANCA followed up its criticism of Biden’s silence on the Artsakh ethnic cleansing with an unsubtle political threat: “With Biden’s numbers slipping in key swing states, it’s clear that Michigan (home to 72,000 Armenians) will play a decisive role in choosing our next president.”
“Even on April 24th Biden persists in outraging Armenian voters by arming Azerbaijan and abandoning Christian Armenians,” the ANCA added, suggesting Biden’s chances with those Michigan Armenian voters might be slipping away.
Left unstated, but doubtless known perfectly well by the savvy Armenian American group, was that Biden is already worried about Michigan because its sizable population of Muslim immigrants is furious at him for not turning more decisively against Israel during the Gaza war.
